Chapter 8 — How to Erase a Memory

Step 1: Find the thread. Step 2: Pull. Step 3: Scream.

The pain was dry and precise, like the inside of your cheek after a paper cut—that specific, localised wrongness that shouldn't hurt as much as it does.

The Original's fingers were inside my chest, not in any way I could see or should have survived, and they were searching for something with the patience of a librarian who knows exactly what she's looking for.

Ellis hit it from the side.

He came apart as he moved—his body erupting into black tendrils, words unspooling from his skin, pages tearing free from whatever held him together. They swarmed the Original's arm, wrapping tight.

"You don't get to edit her!"

The mausoleum shook. Books fell from their shelves and burst apart in midair, each one releasing a voice:

A man: I didn't mean to sign the contract—

A child, singing: the mayor isn't the mayor isn't the mayor isn't—

My mother, full-throated and furious: THE PRESS DOESN'T PRINT—IT EATS!

The Original wrenched its arm free. Something came with it—a strand of light, thin as a hair, that snapped with a sound I felt in my back teeth.

A memory went. I knew it had gone. I just couldn't remember what it was.

Ellis unfolded completely.

He became a storm of loose pages, dense with my mother's handwriting, and they swarmed the Original's head and wrapped around it tight. The creature's hands flailed, its unsealed mouth opened wide.

"YOU'RE JUST A FOOTNOTE!"

I slammed my book shut on the Original's wrist.

That arm flattened. Two-dimensional. A paper cutout where flesh had been. The rest of the creature scrambled backward, leaving newspaper clippings in its wake like shed skin.

Ellis reformed beside me—slower than before. His edges had gone blurry. He looked like a photograph that hadn't quite developed.

"Run," he managed. "Before it—"

Every remaining book in the mausoleum began to scream.

We got out. Behind us, the building collapsed inward in a whirlwind of shredding paper, every story inside eating itself.

Outside, Pigeon Hollow had changed again.

Half the houses were outlines—sketches on the air, no depth, no substance. The people who remained moved in stutters, like old film. And the sky above had gone the pale blue-grey of ruled paper, faint horizontal lines crossing it from horizon to horizon.

Ellis looked up at it. "We're running out of time."

In his palm, the stolen strand of my memory unravelled as we watched, its last light forming words before it vanished:

CANDLELIGHT PRESS BURNS AT MIDNIGHT

The church clock struck eleven.